Lifetime tonight launches Rita Rocks (8:30 ET/PT), its first original comedy series in about a decade. The family comedy revolves around a busy wife and mother (Nicole Sullivan) who finds a bit of welcome escape with her new garage band.

Sullivan (MADtv, The King of Queens) hopes that Lifetime's core female audience will be able to relate to Rita Clemens. The overworked mother is trying to maintain romance with her husband, Jay (Richard Ruccolo), raise teen and pre-teen daughters and work an unfulfilling job to prop up their middle-class existence.

"There's a line where she says, 'I'm happy. I love my husband and I love my children, but there's just something I feel unsatisfied (about). I want a little bit more.' Doesn't that feel like everybody?" says Sullivan, herself a wife and mother of a 1-year-old son.

Guitarist Rita's new band involves her teen daughter's boyfriend (Phil of the Future's Raviv Ullman), an unemployed neighbor (Ian Gomez, Felicity), and neighborhood mail carrier Patty (Tisha Campbell-Martin, My Wife and Kids), who faces different but familiar issues as a single mother and about-to-be empty nester in the dating world.

"We're enjoying creating a friendship between a Caucasian woman and an African-American woman who come from different aspects of life. Patty is a divorced woman with a kid. Rita is married with a family," says James Berg, who created the show with Roseanne and Gilmore Girls writing partner Stan Zimmerman.

"Tisha is an amazing singer, and Nicole has a beautiful voice," Berg says. They will sing songs made famous by such performers as Chaka Khan and Otis Redding.

Sullivan says Rita stands out for its real-life focus.

"We're not reinventing the wheel," she says of the familiar studio-audience format. But "what we haven't seen in a long, long time is a woman at a regular job that she kind of hates. She's a lady that folds towels and gets to come home to her kids, who are a pain in the neck. It really harkens back to Roseanne kind of stuff."

"As you grew to love the Conners and they were part of your family, you could deal with more interesting or controversial issues. Hopefully, in the second or third season, we will be," he says.

Lifetime has shifted gears, empowering rather than imperiling women in the drama Army Wives and adding laughs via syndicated comedies such as Reba, Will & Grace and the upcoming How I Met Your Mother, entertainment chief JoAnn Alfano says.

"We're not going to do women-in-jeopardy movies, and we haven't. That's part of the old perception of the Lifetime brand," Alfano says. "It's a new time here … when you have shows like Rita or Army Wives, which is about women who are as heroic as the men they are married to."

To attract the most attention, the first five Rita episodes will run tonight through Friday (moving to its 8:30 Tuesday slot next week) after Reba, the network's No. 1 show.

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